12. Understanding Conversational Patterns in Police Community Interactions with Vinodkumar Prabhakaran and Camilla Griffiths

12. Understanding Conversational Patterns in Police Community Interactions with Vinodkumar Prabhakaran and Camilla Griffiths

Author: Katherine A. Keith, Naitian Zhou, & Lucy Li January 19, 2022 Duration: 49:08

Our guests on this episode are Vinodkumar Prabhakaran, who was a computer science postdoc at Stanford and now a senior research scientist at Google, and Camilla Griffiths, who is a postdoc at Stanford SPARQ (Social Psychological Answers to Real-world Questions). With Hang Su, Prateek Verma, Nelson Morgan, Jennifer Eberhardt, and Dan Jurafsky, they are co-authors on a TACL 2018 paper, "Detecting Institutional Dialog Acts in Police Traffic Stops".

Vinod and Camilla share with us how this collaboration formed over a common goal and a deep respect for each other’s disciplines. We discuss the considerations that went into forming community partnerships, handling sensitive police body-camera data, and recognizing the implications of their findings.


Behind every published paper or headline-grabbing finding using social data, there's a hidden story of collaboration, dead ends, and problem-solving. Diaries of Social Data Research pulls back the curtain on that process. Hosted by researchers Katherine A. Keith, Naitian Zhou, and Lucy Li, this series sits down with scholars working at the intersection of computational methods and social science to explore the real, human effort behind the datasets. Each conversation functions like an open research diary, detailing how interdisciplinary teams actually come together, navigate differing academic cultures, and tackle the practical hurdles of working with massive, often messy, information about human behavior. You'll hear about the stalled projects, the unexpected breakthroughs, and the meticulous work that turns a raw idea into a credible contribution. This isn't a podcast about polished results, but about the fascinating and often untold journey of modern research. For anyone curious about how we actually study society through data-the alliances built, the ethics debated, and the code debugged late into the night-this series offers a rare and authentic look inside the lab.
Author: Language: English Episodes: 20

Diaries of Social Data Research
Podcast Episodes